Top: View of Central Gdańsk and Main City Hall, Middle-left: Old Town and Motława River at night, Centre: The Maiden in the Window, Middle-right: Neptune's Fountain in Long Market Street, Bottom-left: Neptune's Fountain in front of Artus Court, Bottom-right: Third Millennium John Paul Ⅱ Bridge

The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay (of the Baltic Sea), in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the Tricity (Trójmiasto), with a population approaching 1.4 million. Gdańsk itself has a population of 460,427 (December 2012), making it the largest city in the Pomerania region of Northern Poland.

Gdańsk lies at the mouth of the Motława River, connected to the Leniwka, a branch in the delta of the nearby Vistula River, which drains 60 percent of Poland and connects Gdańsk with the Polish capital, Warsaw. Together with the nearby port of Gdynia, Gdańsk is also an important industrial center. In the late Middle Ages it was an important seaport and shipbuilding town, and in the 14th and 15th centuries a member of the Hanseatic League.

The city's name is thought to originate from the Gdania River,[2] the original name of the Motława branch on which the city is situated. Gdańsk has had many different names throughout its history. The name of a settlement was recorded after St. Adalbert's death in AD 997 as urbs Gyddanyzc[3] and later was written as Kdanzk in 1148, Gdanzc in 1188, Danceke[4] in 1228, Gdansk in 1236,[5]Danzc in 1263, Danczk in 1311,[6]Danczik in 1399,[3][7]Danczig in 1414, Gdąnsk in 1656. In Polish the modern name of the city is pronounced [ɡdaɲsk] (listen). In English (where the diacritic over the "n" is frequently omitted) the usual pronunciation is /ɡəˈdænsk/ or /ɡəˈdɑːnsk/. The German name, "Danzig", is pronounced as [ˈdantsɪç] (listen).

The city's Latin name may be given as either Gedania, Gedanum or Dantiscum; the variety of Latin names reflects the mixed influence of the city's Polish, German and Kashubian heritage. Other former spellings of the name include Dantzig, Dantsic and Dantzic.

On special occasions the city is also referred to as "The Royal Polish City of Gdańsk" (Polish Królewskie Polskie Miasto Gdańsk, Latin Regia Civitas Polonica Gedanensis, Kashubian Królewsczi Polsczi Gard Gduńsk).[8][9][10] In the Kashubian language the city is called Gduńsk. Kashubians also use the name "Our Capital City Gduńsk" (Nasz Stoleczny Gard Gduńsk) or "The Kashubian Capital City Gduńsk" (Stoleczny Kaszëbsczi Gard Gduńsk).

The first written record thought to refer to Gdańsk is the vita of Saint Adalbert. Written in 999, it describes how in 997 Saint Adalbert of Prague baptised the inhabitants of urbs Gyddannyzc, "which separated the great realm of the duke [i.e. Boleslaw the Brave of Poland] from the sea."[11] No further written sources exist for the 10th and 11th centuries.[11] Based on the date in Adalbert's vita, the city celebrated its millennial anniversary in 1997.[12]

Archaeological evidence for the origins of the town was retrieved mostly after World War II had laid 90 percent of the city center in ruins, enabling excavations.[13] The oldest seventeen settlement levels were dated to between 980 and 1308.[12] It is generally thought that Mieszko I of Poland erected a stronghold on the site in the 980s, thereby connecting the Polish state ruled by the Piast dynasty with the trade routes of the Baltic Sea.[14] The dates assigned to the oldest finds have been questioned, resulting in a verification survey in 2003, re-evaluating old finds and also examining new sites on the basis of dendrochronology.[12] None of the remains of the medieval stronghold date to before the 1050.[15] Traces of settlement dating from the 10th century have been found in parts of today's Gdańsk outside the fort area.[16]

The site was ruled on behalf of Poland by the Samborides' duchy and consisted of a settlement at the modern Long Market, craftsmen settlements along the Old Ditch, German merchant settlements around the St Nicolas church and the old Piast stronghold.[19] In 1186, a Cistercian monastery was set up in nearby Oliwa, which is now within the city limits. In 1215, the ducal stronghold became the centre of a Pomerelian splinter duchy. In 1224/25, German merchants from Lübeck established a presence in the area of the earlier fortress as "guests" (hospites) but were soon forced to leave by Swantopolk II of the Samborides in 1238 during a war between Swantopolk and the Teutonic Knights, during which Lübeck supported the latter. Migration of German merchants to the town resumed in 1257.[20] Significant German influence did not appear until the 14th century, after the takeover of the city by the Teutonic Knights.[21]

About 1235, the town was granted city rights under Lübeck law by Pomerelian duke, Swantopolk II. It was an autonomy charter similar to that of Lübeck, which was also the primary origin of many settlers.[19] In 1300, the town had an estimated population of 2,000.[22] While overall the town was not a very important trade centre at that time, it had some relevance in the trade with Eastern Europe.[22] Low on funds, the Samborides lent the settlement to Brandenburg, although they planned to take the city back and give it to Poland. Poland threatened to intervene, and Brandenburg left the town. Subsequently, the city was taken by Danish princes in 1301. The Teutonic Knights were hired by the Polish nobles to clear out the Danes.

In 1308, the town was taken by Brandenburg and the Teutonic Knights were hired by the Polish prince (later king) Władysław I the Elbow-high to restore order. Subsequently, the Knights took over control of the town. Primary sources record a massacre carried out by the Teutonic Knights on the local population,[23] of 10,000 people, but the exact number killed is subject of dispute in modern scholarship.[24] Some authors accept the number given in the original sources,[25] while others consider 10,000 to have been a medieval exaggeration, although scholarly consensus is that a massacre of some magnitude did take place.[24] The events were used by the Polish crown to condemn the Teutonic Knights in a subsequent papal lawsuit.[24][26]

The knights colonised the area, replacing local Kashubians and Poles with German settlers.[25] In 1308, they founded OsiekHakelwerk near the town, initially as a Slavic fishing settlement.[23] In 1340, the Teutonic Knights built a large fortress, which became the seat of the knights' Komtur.[27] In 1343, they founded Rechtstadt, which in contrast to the pre-existing town (thence Altstadt, "Old Town" or Stare Miasto) was chartered with Kulm Law.[23] In 1358, Danzig joined the Hanseatic League, and became an active member in 1361.[28] It maintained relations with the trade centers Bruges, Novgorod, Lisboa and Sevilla.[28] In 1377, the Old Town's city limits were expanded.[23] In 1380, the New Town was founded as the fourth, independent settlement.[23]

After a series of Polish-Teutonic Wars, in the Treaty of Kalisz (1343) the Order had to acknowledge that it would hold Pomerelia as an alm from the Polish Crown. Although it left the legal basis of the Order's possession of the province in some doubt, the city thrived as a result of increased exports of grain (especially wheat), timber, potash, tar, and other goods of forestry from Prussia and Poland via the Vistula Rivertrading routes, despite the fact that after its capture, the Teutonic Knights tried to actively reduce the economic significance of the town. While under the control of the Teutonic Order German migration increased. The Order's religious networks helped to develop Danzig's literary culture.[29] A new war broke out in 1409, ending with the Battle of Grunwald (1410), and the city came under the control of the Kingdom of Poland. A year later, with the First Peace of Thorn, it returned to the Teutonic Order.[30]

On 15 May 1457, Casimir IV of Poland granted the town the Great Privilege, after he had been invited by the town's council and had already stayed in town for five weeks.[33] With the Great Privilege, the town was granted a measure of autonomy within the Kingdom of Poland.[34] The privilege removed tariffs and taxes on trade within Poland, Lithuania and Ruthenia (present day Belarus and Ukraine) and conferred on the town independent jurisdiction, legislation and administration of her territory, as well as the right to mint its own coin.[33] Furthermore, the privilege united Old Town, Osiek and Main Town, and legalised the demolition of New Town, which had sided with the Teutonic Knights.[33] By 1457, New Town was demolished completely, no buildings remained.[23]

Gaining free and privileged access to Polish markets, the seaport prospered while simultaneously trading with the other Hanseatic cities. After the Second Peace of Thorn (1466) with the Teutonic Monastic State of Prussia the warfare between the latter and the Polish crown ended permanently. After the Union of Lublin between Poland and Lithuania in 1569 the city continued to enjoy a large degree of internal autonomy (cf. Danzig Law).

In the 1575 election of a king to the Polish throne, Danzig supported Maximilian II against Stephen Báthory. It was the latter who eventually became monarch but the city, encouraged by the secret support of Denmark and Emperor Maximilian, shut its gates against Stephen. After the Siege of Danzig (1577), lasting six months, the city's army of 5,000 mercenaries was utterly defeated in a field battle on 16 December 1577. However, since Stephen's armies were unable to take the city by force, a compromise was reached: Stephen Báthory confirmed the city's special status and her Danzig Law privileges granted by earlier Polish kings. The city recognised him as ruler of Poland and paid the enormous sum of 200,000 guldens in gold as payoff ("apology").

Beside the large numbers of German-speakers, whose elites sometimes distinguished their German dialect as Pomerelian,[35] the city was home to a large number of Polish-speaking Poles, Jewish Poles, Latvian speakingKursenieki, Flemings and Dutch. In addition, a number of Scots took refuge or migrated to and received citizenship in the city. During the Protestant Reformation, most German-speaking inhabitants adopted Lutheranism. Due to the special status of the city and significance within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the city inhabitants largely became bi-cultural sharing both Polish and German culture and were strongly attached to the traditions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.[36]

When Poland regained its independence after World War I with access to the sea as promised by the Allies on the basis of Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" (point 13 called for "an independent Polish state", "which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea"), the Poles hoped the city's harbour would also become part of Poland. However, since Germans formed a majority in the city, with Poles being a minority,[38] the city was not placed under Polish sovereignty. Instead, in accordance with the terms of the Versailles Treaty, it became the Free City of Danzig (German: Freie Stadt Danzig), an independent quasi-state under the auspices of the League of Nations with its external affairs largely under Polish control. Poland's rights also included free use of the harbour, a Polish post office, a Polish garrison in Westerplatte district, and customs union with Poland. This led to a considerable tension between the city and the Republic of Poland. The Free City had its own constitution, national anthem, parliament (Volkstag), and government (Senat). It issued its own stamps as well as its currency, the Danzig Gulden.

In the early 1930s the local Nazi Party capitalised on pro-German sentiments and in 1933 garnered 50% of vote in the parliament. Thereafter, the Nazis under GauleiterAlbert Forster achieved dominance in the city government, which was still nominally overseen by the League of Nations' High Commissioner. The German government officially demanded the return of Danzig to Germany along with an extraterritorial (meaning under German jurisdiction) highway through the area of the Polish Corridor for land-based access from the rest of Germany. Hitler used the issue of the status of the city as a pretext for attacking Poland and on May 1939, during a high level meeting of German military officials explained to them: "It is not Danzig that is at stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our Lebensraum in the east", adding that there will be no repeat of the Czech situation, and Germany will attack Poland at first opportunity, after isolating the country from its Western Allies.[39][40][41][42][43] As Nazi demands increased, German-Polish relations rapidly deteriorated. Germany invaded Poland on September 1 after having signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in late August.

The German attack began in Danzig, with a bombardment of Polish positions at Westerplatte by the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, and the landing of German infantry on the peninsula. Outnumbered Polish defenders at Westerplatte resisted for seven days before running out of ammunition. Meanwhile, after a fierce day-long fight (1 September 1939), defenders of the Polish Post office were tried and executed then buried on the spot in the Danzig quarter of Zaspa in October 1939. In 1998 a German court overturned their conviction and sentence.

The city was officially annexed by Nazi Germany and incorporated into the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia. About 50 percent of members of the Jewish Community of Danzig had left the city within a year after a Pogrom in October 1937,[44] after the Kristallnacht riots in November 1938 the community decided to organize its emigration[45] and in March 1939 a first transport to Palestine started.[46] By September 1939 barely 1,700 mostly elderly Jews remained. In early 1941 just 600 Jews were still living in Danzig most of whom were later murdered in the Holocaust.[44][47] Out of the 2,938 Jewish community in the city 1,227 were able to escape from the Nazis before the outbreak of war.[48][dubious– discuss]Nazi secret police had been observing Polish minority communities in the city since 1936, compiling information, which in 1939 served to prepare lists of Poles to be captured in Operation Tannenberg. On the first day of the war, approximately 1,500 ethnic Poles were arrested, some because of their participation in social and economic life, others because they were activists and members of various Polish organisations. On 2 September 1939, 150 of them were deported to the Sicherheitsdienst camp Stutthof some 30 miles (48 km) from Danzig, and murdered.[49] Many Poles living in Danzig were deported to Stutthof or executed in the Piaśnica forest.

In 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, eventually causing the fortunes of war to turn against Germany. As the Soviet Army advanced in 1944, German populations in Central and Eastern Europe took flight, resulting in the beginning of a great population shift. After the final Soviet offensives began in January 1945, hundreds of thousands of German refugees converged on Danzig, many of whom had fled on foot from East Prussia, some tried to escape through the city's port in a large-scale evacuation involving hundreds of German cargo and passenger ships. Some of the ships were sunk by the Soviets, including the Wilhelm Gustloff after an evacuation was attempted at neighbouring Gdynia. In the process, tens of thousands of refugees were killed.

Example of Dutch-style buildings rebuilt after the war: The Old Arsenal by Anthony van Obberghen, Jan Strakowski and Abraham van den Blocke, 1602–1605.[56]

Parts of the historic old city of Gdańsk, which had suffered large-scale destruction during the war, were rebuilt during the 1950s and 1960s. The reconstruction was not tied to the city's pre-war appearance, but instead was politically motivated as a means of culturally cleansing and destroying all traces of German influence from the city.[57][58][59] Any traces of German tradition were ignored, suppressed, or regarded as "Prussian barbarism" only worthy of demolition,[60][61] while Flemish/Dutch, Italian and French influences were used to replace the historically accurate Germanic architecture which the city was built upon since the 14th century.[62]

In December 1970, Gdańsk was the scene of anti-regime demonstrations, which led to the downfall of Poland's communist leader Władysław Gomułka. During the demonstrations in Gdańsk and Gdynia, military as well as the police opened fire on the demonstrators causing several dozen deaths. Ten years later, in August, 1980, Gdańsk Shipyard was the birthplace of the Solidaritytrade union movement, whose opposition to the Communist regime led to the end of Communist Party rule in 1989, and sparked a series of protests that successfully overturned the Communist regimes of the former Soviet bloc. Solidarity's leader, Lech Wałęsa became President of Poland in 1990. In 2014 the European Solidarity Centre, a museum and library devoted to the history of the movement, opened in Gdańsk.[63]

Gdańsk has an oceanic climate, with cold, cloudy, moderate winters and mild summers with frequent showers and thunderstorms. Average temperatures range from −1.0 to 17.2 °C (30.2 to 63.0 °F) and average rainfall varies from 17.9 mm/month to 66.7 mm/month. In general it is damp, variable and mild.

The seasons are clearly differentiated. Spring starts in March and is initially cold and windy, later becoming pleasantly warm and often very sunny. Summer, which begins in June, is predominantly warm but hot at times (with temperature reaching as high as 30-35C at least once per year) with plenty of sunshine interspersed with heavy rain. The average annual hours of sunshine for Gdańsk are 1700. July and August are the hottest months. Autumn comes in September and is at first warm and usually sunny, turning cold, damp and foggy in November. Winter lasts from December to March and includes periods of snow. January and February are the coldest months with the temperature sometimes dropping as low as −15 °C (5 °F).

The industrial sections of the city are dominated by shipbuilding, petrochemical & chemical industries, and food processing. The share of high-tech sectors such as electronics, telecommunications, IT engineering, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals is on the rise. Amber processing is also an important part of the local economy, as the majority of the world's amber deposits lie along the Baltic coast. The Pomeranian Voivodeship, including Gdańsk, is also a major tourist destination in the summer, as millions of Poles and other European tourists flock to the beaches of the Baltic coastline. Major companies in Gdańsk:

The city has some buildings surviving from the time of the Hanseatic League. Most tourist attractions are located along or near Ulica Długa (Long Street) and Długi Targ (Long Market), a pedestrian thoroughfare surrounded by buildings reconstructed in historical (primarily during the 17th century) style and flanked at both ends by elaborate city gates. This part of the city is sometimes referred to as the Royal Road, since it was once the former path of processions for visiting kings.

The Szybka Kolej Miejska (Tricity), (SKM) the 'Fast Urban Railway,' functions as a Metro system for the Tricity area including Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia, operating frequent trains to 27 stations covering the Tricity.[70] The service is operated by electric multiple unit trains at a frequency of 6 minutes to 30 minutes between trains (depending on the time of day) on the central section between Gdańsk and Gdynia, and less frequently on outlying sections. The SKM system has been extended northwest of the Tricity, to Wejherowo, Lębork and Słupsk, 110 kilometres (68 miles) west of Gdynia, and to the south it has been extended to Tczew, 31 kilometres (19 miles) south of Gdańsk.

In 2011–2015 the Warsaw-Gdańsk-Gdynia railway route underwent a major upgrading costing $3 billion, partly funded by the European Investment Bank, including track replacement, realignment of curves and relocation of sections of track to allow speeds up to 200 km/h (124 mph), modernization of stations, and installation of the most modern ETCS signalling system, which was completed in June 2015. In December 2014 new AlstomPendolino high-speed trains were put into service between Gdańsk, Warsaw and Kraków reducing the rail travel time from Gdańsk to Warsaw to 2 hours 58 minutes,[71][72] further reduced in December 2015 to 2 hours 39 minutes.[73]

There are many popular professional sports teams in the Gdańsk and Tricity area. Amateur sports are played by thousands of Gdańsk citizens and also in schools of all levels (elementary, secondary, university).

Contemporary Gdańsk is the capital of the province called Pomeranian Voivodeship and is one of the major centers of economic and administrative life in Poland. Many important agencies of the state and local government levels have their main offices here: the Provincial Administration Office, the Provincial Government, the Ministerial Agency of the State Treasury, the Agency for Consumer and Competition Protection, the National Insurance regional office, the Court of Appeals, and the High Administrative Court.